52

 

The Situation Room

The White House

Washington, DC

“This can’t be true, General Alton.” President Camara stared at the NSA brief in his hand.

“I’m afraid it’s very real, Mr. President,” said the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who was stationed at the White House.

“Yes, we verified that it came from Nash Lee,” said Susan Wright.

There were only the three of them in the Situation Room. Dr. Wright had gotten the urgent brief from NSA and had immediately sought General Alton’s counsel. They’d both decided that the president, alone, should see this brief first. They’d bring others into the loop once the president had decided on a course of action.

The president looked up from the brief. “So they’re really keeping Nash inside the king’s palace, against his wishes?”

“It would appear so,” Alton said.

“So get the Saudi ambassador over here immediately,” Camara said. “This is unacceptable. There will be repercussions.”

“Prince Omar is already on his way,” Dr. Wright said. “He will be here shortly.”

“And does he know why we’ve summoned him?” Camara asked.

“He does,” Wright answered. “He says Nash is a guest of the king, not a prisoner.”

Camara reached for the phone. “I’m calling Faisal. This is—”

“Mr. President,” Alton said. “Before you do, can we discuss the second part of that brief—the reason Nash asked his company to call NSA and deliver the message they did?”

President Camara sighed. “Fine. It seems a little…outrageous.”

Alton and Wright exchanged glances.

“If I may, Mr. President,” Wright said. “I’d like to give you a little background. It may help explain why we believe Nash’s report is credible and actionable.”

“All right,” Camara said, his voice strained. “I’m listening. But be quick about it. I intend to call Faisal. I’m not waiting for his ambassador to get here. I expect to hear from Nash myself by the time I hang up with Faisal.”

“I’ll get to the point, Mr. President,” Wright said. “But first, are you familiar with Frodo?”

“The hobbit from The Lord of the Rings?”

Wright smiled. “Well, yes, there’s that Frodo. But I mean the Frodo system, developed by the data-mining and software engineers Nash hired from MIT, Stanford, and Cal Tech. They built a custom software system for NSA last year.”

“Vaguely,” Camara said. “I’ve seen it a few times in the morning briefing reports. It always seemed like a silly name for such a powerful system.”

“It’s a scientist and engineer thing. They’re geeks,” Wright said. “But here’s the point. Frodo is, by far, the most sophisticated intelligencegathering system ever devised. It’s a generation ahead of its time. It’s a little like the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. In this case, they taught a network of computers how to look through more data than any group of human beings could ever deal with. It’s how we’ve been able to make connections to al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, you name it.”

“I guess I don’t want to ask how they do it,” Camara said.

“It would take awhile to explain,” Wright answered. “But what Frodo can do with a defined set of information, when asked to compare it to big data sets, is nothing short of a miracle.”

President Camara wasn’t a scientist, but he’d heard enough of these sorts of briefings to jump to the end of the page. “All right, I understand the context for the briefing now. So when the Saudis gave Nash that set of mobile telephone numbers—the ones that the Saudi intelligence agency had been tracking to look for an Arab Revolt thing—and he fed that into Frodo, it kicked out patterns and knowledge it would not otherwise have been able to come up with on its own?”

“Precisely,” Wright said, glad her boss was so smart. It made her job that much easier. “It found a couple of needles in the haystack.”

“So these Day of Anger protests that are set to occur in…” Camara glanced down at the brief.

“In two days,” Alton interjected. “They’re going to occur in every city in Saudi Arabia that has any sort of significant Shi’a population— Dammam, Qatif, Medina, Mecca, even Riyadh, we believe.”

Camara nodded. “And this Day of Anger is truly spontaneous. That’s what Frodo found? They traced it back to three students with mobile numbers on the list the Saudis gave Nash? But they weren’t coordinated, or even planned? The students just made things up, sent the information out through mVillage network, and others latched on to it?”

“Exactly,” Dr. Wright said. “There’s no grand conspiracy—at least among those students. The Day of Anger is truly a random thing, created by some bored students who decided to throw verbal graffiti at the wall on the network.”

“That pan-Islamic flag, the Arab Revolt flag?”

“Made up by one of those students,” Wright said. “But it’s spread like wildfire.”

“The notion about bringing back the kingdom of Hejaz? And that Israel is behind it, that they’re inciting a war between the Shiites of Iran and the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia?”

“Pure fiction. Made up. Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this.”

“But the world won’t believe that,” Camara said quietly.

“Of course not. Iran is likely to play that card, even though it’s patently false. And from the brief, we know that someone within the royal family will as well.”

“And this librarian, what’s his name?”

“Mehmet Osman,” Alton answered. “He’s in his eighties now. He’s a real heir to the last caliph from the Ottoman Empire.”

Camara shook his head. “So do we have someone on the way to find him in London, make sure he’s staying put?”

“We’ve contacted the embassy in London. They’re sending someone,” Alton reported.

“Good.” Camara exhaled in frustration. “That’s all we need, is for someone to take advantage of the Day of Anger in these Saudi cities to start something bigger.”

“But Mr. President, that’s precisely what’s happened,” Wright said. “That’s one of the two needles in that big data haystack that Frodo found. That’s one of the reasons Nash had his lead engineer send us the information. It would appear that someone has already taken full advantage of the opportunity presented by the Day of Anger to advance his own cause.”

“The White Army?” asked the president.

“Yes, the internal security forces commanded by Prince Natal,” Wright said. “Frodo found patterns that nothing else could have found. It is quite obvious that the White Army—or at least some part of it— is deliberately fanning the flames of civil unrest in each of these cities. They are, in fact, turning the Day of Anger into a direct, potentially violent conflict against the royal family.

“They also found a connection between Natal and this retired White Army general, Fahd, who’s been broadcasting that he will lead a new Free the Kingdom Army in exile. Not definitive, but an awfully good lead. It would appear that Natal is fomenting unrest in the kingdom, for whatever purpose.”

Camara closed his eyes. “But we have no hard proof that Prince Natal is behind this, do we? All we have is this pattern created by a system called Frodo? That’s hardly actionable.”

“No, it’s not actionable,” Alton said. “And it’s not something you can raise with Faisal, either. But we must prepare for this war that will almost certainly erupt across the Arabian Peninsula in only two days’ time. Especially because of the second needle in the haystack that Frodo found.”

“The nuclear weapons shipment from North Korea, through Iran?” Camara asked.

“Yes,” Alton said. “We knew the North Koreans had only partially given us everything they had. But Frodo found patterns that connect the White Army to Iran’s president and then back to North Korea. We have to assume that some sort of a portable nuclear weapon is now inside Saudi territory.”

“And you trust this connection?” Camara asked.

“I do…we both do,” Wright said. “Frodo has never been wrong. It finds patterns that others can’t possibly find.”

“And when that thing goes off…”

“It will seem like the gates of hell have opened wide,” Alton said grimly. “Natal has a history of blaming Israel whenever possible, and that seed has already been planted across the mVillage network. Iran certainly isn’t going to take credit or declare outright war against Saudi Arabia. They always operate through proxies.”

“Though I’d say that this will be as close to a declaration of war by Iran as you can possibly get,” Wright said. “We may be witnessing the start of a Shi’a-Sunni war—the one we’ve all been anticipating for some time.”

“So we’d better put our troops in Israel, near Beersheba, on alert,” Camara reasoned. “What about our ships in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean?”

“All ready, and expecting the worst,” Alton reported. “We’re ready for a storm, whatever it might be.”

The president nodded, satisfied he had enough information to go on. “And we can’t warn Faisal about any of this?”

“No, we can’t,” Wright said. “None of this is dispositive—it’s just a set of connections drawn by a very powerful data-mining network. There’s no smoking gun.”

“But we can take precautions,” Alton added. “And we have.”

“Well, there is one thing I can do,” the president said, reaching for the phone. “I can make sure they let Nash walk out of the king’s palace unharmed. And as soon as that’s done, I plan on calling Nash’s father to make sure that Ethan pins the North Koreans’ ears back for creating this mess in the first place.”